Jayden loves animals and toy animals. He particularly loves BIG animals like elephants, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, giraffes, lions, tigers and lately, dinosaurs of various kinds. He likes ’em BIG!
But we can learn a lot from how he plays with them.
Look…
Little animals are all riding on the big animals.
They are all friends in his animal utopia!
Kindness, goodwill, benevolence, harmony are all inborn concepts in a child’s heart.
It is adults who contaminate it and teach them to discriminate. So let’s not be that kind of adult!
The other day at playgroup, there was water play and the children were supposed to fish out toy fishes from the water. One girl fished out a shark and put the shark back into the water. Her mother praised her (for doing the right thing).
There is hope.
Kindergartens have a very important role to play, actually. But that would be a story for another platform at another time! Children’s fairy tales and stories too, for that matter. Many of the western time-tested fables are actually very violent. I remember avoiding such fairy tales or I would change the ending for my children. I even reworded nursery rhymes to make them kinder!